The progress of the research at Roca dels Moros, with the work of the researchers who studied it, is illustrated through these reproductions known as calcs, or tracings.

The prehistorian Henri Breuil also travelled to El Cogul in the summer of 1908 to begin his research. He attributed the mural to the Upper Palaeolithic and in the tracing he presented, made by Luís Izquierdo, he transformed the deteriorated figure of a quadruped into a Pleistocene bison, where today we see a common wild boar.

The author indicated other novelties, such as the existence of engraved details, and he believed that the scene of the group of women might have represented a “phallic dance”.

Ceferí Rocafort and Juli Soler, together with Lluis Vidal, conducted research sponsored by the Institute of Catalan Studies and Centre Excursionista de Catalunya that documented up to 33 figures. Contrary to what H. Breuil proposed, they believed that the painted mural possibly corresponded to the Neolithic period.

Thus began a debate on the dating of the mural that continues until this day.

A few years later, the mural began to be related to other groups discovered in the mountain ranges of the pre-coastal Mediterranean peninsular. In 1915, Joan Cabré analysed the similarity of the ornaments of the human figure with figures observed in Alpera and El Charco del Agua Amarga.

The same author examined in detail the colouring and tonalities of the female figures and followed Breuil’s hypothesis, ascribing the paintings to the late Upper Palaeolithic.

Later, in 1952, Martín Almagro summarised and reviewed all the studies conducted until that time. He identified a total of 45 painted figures and various engravings.

This was the first copy to include Iberian and Roman inscriptions. The chronological attribution proposed by this author falls within the Mesolithic period.

In 1985, documentation of the rock paintings was conducted by the specialists Ramon Viñas, Anna Alonso and Elisa Sarriá as part of the Corpus de Pintures Rupestres de Catalunya (Corpus of Rock Paintings of Catalonia) project by the Department of Culture’s Archaeology Service.

This documentation included a new tracing that records 42 painted representations, as well as providing fragments of new figures and various details that had not been observed in other works. The superimpositions were also identified as a sign of the complexity of the mural’s execution. 

The Catalan Agency of Cultural Heritage initiated an operation to clean the rock in 2019. The work, carried out by Eudald Guillamet and Laura Ballester, involved cleaning away soluble salts of anthropic origin to help improve the visibility of the rock art site.

The Catalan Agency of Cultural Heritage commissioned new documentation work on Roca dels Moros in 2019 from the archaeologists Albert Rubio and Ramon Viñas, and a new copy of the mural, the most recent, was produced.